Under the new partnership, LRP and spring Messe Management will leverage their combined 40 years of experience producing HR program content and expositions to help vendors extend their reach into new global markets, assisting them in their efforts to cultivate new business relationships and launch effective marketing initiatives.

The alliance will also provide these vendors with fresh insights on the competitive landscape and strategies for successfully entering and marketing in new regions.

“It’s clear this alliance will fast track and transform the way HR-technology service providers expand internationally,” says LRP Publications President Kenneth Kahn, adding that it’s a “game-changing comprehensive offering” that combines LRP’s community of more than 20,000 professionals from its U.S. and Asia events with Zukunft Personal’s strong network of 25,000 professionals from across Europe, primarily in Germany and Austria.

Ralf Hocke, CEO of spring Messe Management, says the alliance enables Zukunft Personal to build “a strong bridge across the Atlantic,” adding that it will support exhibitors in their efforts to successfully enter the U.S. market and expand their international client base.

Zukunft Personal brings together the world’s leading vendors and features more than 450 interactive presentations that are led by HR visionaries such as Gary Kildare, Tammy Erickson, Dan Price and Nell Watson.

Zukunft Personal will be held on Sept. 11 through 13 in Cologne, Germany, while the HR Tech Conference will be held Sept. 11 through 14 in Las Vegas.

The announcement comes of the heels of HRE’s acquisition last week of HRM Asia, which produces a magazine and events for the Asian marketplace.

David Shadovitz is editor of HRE. He is also co-chair of the HR Tech Conference and chair of the Health & Benefits Leadership Conference. He can be reached at [email protected]

If Your Recruiting Fails, Your Business Isn’t Far Behind

This summer, unemployment rates in the U.S. dropped down to 4.3 percent and the ratio of unemployed persons per job opening trended downward to 1.1, resulting in fewer available workers1. If unemployment rates remain low in 2018, employers will continue to face fierce competition for talent. This is a major worry, especially considering what a direct impact recruiting has on a company’s corporate brand and revenue.

Meeting the expectations of today’s job candidates will not only help employers get top talent in the door, it will unequivocally affect their business’ goals. When a business is understaffed, its operations and results suffer. In fact, when the right talent cannot be found, lost profit and revenue can be as high as $23,000 per unfilled position2. Just posting a job and reviewing the candidates that come in is no longer enough to hire the best talent.

Recruiting in this environment is clearly not just a concern for the HR department; it needs to be top of mind for senior executives in all areas of the organization. As the front of the HR funnel, talent acquisition is a necessary area of focus and investment in order to maintain a strong employer brand, build a healthy pipeline of candidates and make the best hires for the success of your business. But if you aren’t using the right tools to get to the candidates you want, you might be turning off potential applicants.

As competition for top talent has increased, so have the number of solutions to address this strategic function. The list of vendors supporting the recruiting process has grown into the thousands and changes almost daily. We’ve seen this not only from talent acquisitions start-ups, but also from HCM providers who offer add-on recruitment modules, and tech giants like Google sharpening their focus on the job seeking experience.

While the hiring landscape evolves, candidates are gaining control over the hiring process more than ever before. Increasingly, job seekers are approaching looking for a job like any other major purchase, from research to comparison, to making the final decision to “buy” or “apply.” This is why it’s incredibly important for companies to start considering consumer marketing tactics to attract job seekers to their employer brand. Their competitors probably already are.

The Modern Job Seeker Report, based on iCIMS proprietary survey data, uncovered some of the trends and drivers behind what makes a great candidate experience, and the impact that consumer technologies like online reviews, social media, and mobile applications have on recruiting efforts. For example, when researching a potential employer, working Americans rank employer reviews as the most important content followed by textual content on the company website and company publications or products3. Think about how important ratings and reviews are to you while shopping online. Employer review sites have become an equally integral part of the job search process, with more than 41 million unique users visiting Glassdoor’s mobile applications and website each month.

There is an enormous opportunity for companies to use 2018 as a fresh start and embrace a redesigned approach to attracting and hiring talent. Regardless of whether they get a job offer, applicants who are satisfied with their candidate experience are more than twice as likely to recommend the hiring organization to others, compared with those who were not satisfied4. On the flip side, candidates who have a poor recruitment experience are less likely to purchase products from the hiring company and are more likely to share negative feedback with their networks—and their feedback matters greatly.

An outstanding candidate experience lives and dies by the type of hiring technology you employ. You need a talent acquisition platform that offers robust integration capabilities to bring all the aspects of the increasingly chaotic recruitment technology landscape together. This way, you can leverage the individual strengths of social recruiting, job advertising, career site SEO, and screening tools that make it easier to find and attract the right people, yet still have a graceful transition of data to your HCM through one unified hub. When HR can offer a comprehensive analysis of the organization’s specific hiring landscape, they offer a glimpse into the business’ potential for success in the coming year.